Efforts to establish
a Utah Museum of Fine Arts go back to the days of Alice Merrill Horne.
The University of Utah created the UMFA in 1951 with its acquisition
of the art collection of former Utahn, Mrs. Richard Hudnut. Its collection
was housed originally in the Park Building; a new building for the museum
was constructed as part of the Art and Architecture Center and opened
in 1970. Greatly expanded and valuable collections coupled with a program
of major traveling exhibitions have established it as the premier art
museum in the state.
Several other
museums associated with the state should be mentioned. The Prehistoric
Museum at the College of Eastern Utah in Price was founded in 1961 and
has doubled its space with the construction of a new facility in 1991.
Its exhibits and collections focus on the Central Utah region in the
fields of anthropology and paleontology. Weber State University's Museum
of Natural Science in Ogden was founded in 1969 and serves primarily
as a teaching museum in the areas of biology and geology. Farther north
in Logan, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, founded in 1982 and
located at Utah State University (USU), features traveling exhibits
and exhibitions from its contemporary and Native American collections.
USU's Man and His Bread Museum, founded in 1959, features agricultural
equipment and buildings, from circa 1840 to 1950, in an off-campus outdoor
farm setting.
The Salt Lake
Art Center, originally known as the "Art Barn," was founded in 1931
near the University of Utah. An art school and gallery in the beginning,
this private organization moved to the county-owned Salt Palace complex
in 1979. Its collections and exhibitions focus on contemporary art.